[Nottingham] Partition problem

[Philip Scott]

Hmm,

Ignoring your partition-overlapping problem for a second (I don't _think_ it's 
what's causing this, it just looks like whatever it was that set them up did 
not have the correct drive geometry - I don't think (well, hope at least ;) 
installing fedora would have fiddled with them, and it doesn't seem to be 
fatal.)

If you can mount hda2 and hda3, then it seems strange to think that hda1 would 
be unmountable if you had ntfs support.

Here is a possible answer - which drive do you boot off (you can change this 
in the bios)? Has Grub inadvertently been installed on your windows partition 
(which would explain why you just get Grub back up again). When you press 
enter, does it move your selection back up to the top, in an 
i've-just-loaded-myself-again sort of fashion?

I find the grub drive numbers to be a bit.. strange, for me they change around 
when I fiddle with settings in the bios. When you get to the grub screen, you 
should be able to get to a grub console - you can then check that the hd(0,0) 
is indeed the partition you think it is by trying something like

more(hd0,0)/

And then pressing tab to try and get it to autocomplete.

Before you resort to completely wiping hda, try booting of the XP CD, going to 
the recovery console thing - and there are commands to restore your boot 
record and mbr, they might be worth trying. I can't for the life of me 
remember what they are (I think you get a list by typing 'help'). It's 
'fixmbr' and 'fixboot' or something along those lines if I remember 
correctly.. 

Let us know how things go! (I'm not completely out of ideas yet..)

Regards,
	Philip